Tue, 07 Mar 2017

What’s next? You may wish to consider using a VPN. In simple terms, it’s somewhat similar to what Tor offers. That is: you connect to the VPN and your connection passes through them such that the site that you are visiting will see the VPN’s IP address rather than yours. Of course, that means that you can chain them.

That is: (You)->VPN->Tor->Exit node->Web site

The reason that you might feel compelled to take this step is that a party which is able to see your traffic into and out of Tor could still identify you. The thinking is that the parties who wish to interfere with your privacy could be compelled to run Tor bridges, relays and exit nodes. If traffic from your IP address could be matched to requests coming from the Tor exit node then you could, effectively, be identified.

Some people hold that using a VPN to access Tor does not improve your anonymousness. I am not among them. In particular, you will find that IPVanish offers VPN service for under $7 per month and is popular among users of the Tor network. Which means that in addition to the fact that IPVanish is not logging your traffic, there’s an excellent chance that other users are going from IPVanish into Tor, helping to reduce the uniqueness of your traffic.

IPVanish’s site offers instructions for installing the VPN in Ubuntu so we’re going to take a look at using IPVanish in Kali — including an interesting and unanticipated snag (and, of course, how to fix it).

And this is where I had anticipated the installation instructions would end.

I just wanted to check a few more things. And I would love to tell you that it was simply my thoroughness and unbridled CLI-fu that led to discover that I was still making ipv6 connections outside of the VPN. Seems that it wasn’t noticed by the test at IPVanish because they deal only in ipv4. I was able to prove my ipv6 address and geolocation by using: http://whatismyipaddress.com/

Further, we can establish that the test at IPVanish is not ipv6-compatible with a quick test.

The easy fix here is to disable ipv6 locally. It is plausible that this could cause unintended consequences and, to be thorough, it would be best to handle your VPN at the firewall. Having support for OpenVPN, you’ll be able to get this running with a huge variety of routing/firewall solutions. You can grab any number of tiny computers and build a professional-quality firewall solution with something like pfSense. Maybe we’ll take a look at getting that configured in a future post.

But, for now, let’s shut down ipv6 in a way that doesn’t involve any grandiose hand-waving magic (i.e., unexplained commands which probably should work) and then test to get confidence in our results.

Let’s use sysctl to find our ipv6 kernel bits and turn them off. Then we’ll load our configuration changes. As a safety, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to look in /etc/sysctl.conf to verify that there aren’t any ipv6 configs in there.

To explain what we’re doing:
List all kernel flags; show uonly those containing the string ‘ipv6’; of those that remain, show only those that contain the string ‘disable’:sysctl -a | grep -i ipv6 | grep disable
Replace the 0 values with 1, to turn ON the disabling, by piping output to:sed 's/0/1/g'
That all gets stuck on the end of ‘sysctl.conf’ by redirecting stdout to append to the end of that file:>> /etc/sysctl.conf
Then we reload with:sysctl -p

Thu, 30 May 2013

In this writer’s opinion, it is vitally important that we take reasonable measures now to help insure anonymity, lest we create a situation where privacy no longer exists, and the simple want of, becomes suspicious.

Here’s how to configure your browser to automatically use a search engine that respects your privacy.

Chrome:

Click Settings.

Click “Set pages” in the “On startup” section.

Enter https://ixquick.com/eng/ in the “Add a new page” text field.

Click OK.

Click “Manage search engines…”

At the bottom of the “Search Engines” dialog, click in the “Add a new search engine” field.

Mon, 20 May 2013

I have finished (more-or-less) making a demo for the Xdebug togglin’ add-on/extension that I’ve developed.

One hundred percent of the feedback about this project has been from Chrome users. Therefore, the Chrome extension has advanced with the new features (v2.0), allowing selective en/dis-ableing portions of Xdebug’s output. That is you can set Xdebug to firehose mode (spitting out everything) and then squelch anything not immediately needed at the browser layer. The other information remains present, hidden in the background, available if you decide that you need to have a look.

The Firefox version is still at v1.2 but will be brought up to speed as time permits.

If you want that firehose mode for Xdebug, here’s a sample of some settings for your configuration ‘.ini’ file.